Ideal Beauty

Has anyone seen this story about a 16-year-old girl who scored extremely high on her IQ test and enjoys getting manicures, getting highlights and fake tans. When I say high on her IQ test, I mean she’s smarter than Albert Einstein.

What is wrong with spending time on beauty and also being brilliant? Does there need to be a clear distinction between the two?

By focusing on her appearance the author makes it appear that a beautiful woman can’t also be very smart.

I often feel guilty when I am getting a manicure and think that I should only be focusing on studying. But why can’t I do both.. be smart and also beautify myself?

The more pressing question is why does the media focus on this topic or maybe it is just a reflection of how the society feels about smart and attractive women. Why can’t we just admit that we have a hard time acknowledging that women can be both beautiful and smart? It’s as if we expect very intelligent women to be unattractive. The larger problem is that some men have a hard time disengaging from viewing women as sexual objects.

The way women perceive themselves also goes back to how they are treated in school.
Laura says that even teachers have had the stereotype that blondes are dumb.
She says, “My teachers knew I was quite clever because of my grades but they had always thought I was blonde and a bit ditzy,” Now they keey saying ‘I didn’t realize you were that clever.” What message is that teacher giving young girls—that pretty can’t also be smart. Hopefully this article will squash stereotypes about what a smart girl looks like.

The New York Times, recently featured an article about makeup. I highly recommend it. I have so many thoughts on this topic, I really don’t know where to begin. I started wearing lipstick when I was about 15 years old. As I said earlier, I used the attention I received from my appearance to make me feel special in high school when I felt really alone.

I recently wrote about a study by Proctor & Gamble that said wearing makeup boosts people’s perceptions of women’s likeability. As I mentioned in the blog post, I am more interested in how makeup changes the person who is wearing it than how the woman wearing it is perceived.

One of the columnists, a male makeup artist, says: “applying makeup is sort of like a man donning armor to prepare himself for battle.” Why is appearing physically beautiful considered armor? I’m confused. Shouldn’t armor be an actual skill like intellect, wit or strength?

The essay, I enjoyed reading the most “A Choice, Not a Requirement,” by Deborah Rhode, a law professor at Stanford who wrote a book, “The Beauty Bias,” that speaks about the cost of being discriminated based on looks. She mentions Darlene Jesperson, a female bartender who was fired for not wearing makeup. While Rhode doesn’t specifically point to makeup as the problem she does see it as a problem when wearing makeup is forced upon women. She also acknowledges that women should be judged on more than just their appearance.

For full disclosure, I am one to put in concealer, and some eyeliner and yes, it does make me feel good but why does it make me feel better is the better question?

I came across a really interesting study that objectification theory; the researchers tested 98 college women on measures of self objectification and personality traits. According to the study women who adopted more feminine personality traits are more likely to self objectify themselves. The study also found that women who identify with more stereotypically masculine traits experience less self objectification.

Intellect was negatively related to self objectification. If women are spending their cognitive resources worrying about how they appear to the outside world, how can they possibly focus on using their energy on other aspects of their life including studying and intellectual debate?

It is also important to point out that beauty and self objectification are not mutually exclusive. One can be physically attractive and not care what others think of him/her. The study also found a negative relationship to self objectification and agreeableness. When women are constantly having a third person’s voice in their head, they will have a difficult time asserting their own point of view. It takes an extreme amount of energy to think about what people are thinking about one’s physical characteristics and then have the resources to focus on her/his own point of view.

Speaking from personal experience when I am consumed with thinking about other people’s opinions about me, I have a really hard time claiming a position that might conflict with the person I am speaking to. Then, I find myself wanting to appease the person whom I feel is judging me. This reduces opportunities for intellectual debate.

On the topic of beauty I have been reading The Beauty Myth,, by Naomi Wolf. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in beauty, power and objectification.

There were so many interesting passages but I will share this one:

“The rites of beauty are able to isolate women so well because it is not yet publicly recognized that devotees are trapped in something more serious than a fashion and more socially pervasive than a private distortion of self image. The Rites are not yet described in terms of what they actually represent: a new fundamentalism transforming the secular West, repressive and doctrinaire as any Eastern counterpart. As women cope with hypermodernity to which they have only recently been admitted, a force that is in affect a mass hypnosis into a medieval worldview is pushing on them its full weight. Meanwhile, the great cathedral under whose shadow they live goes unmentioned. When other women do refer to it–self deprecatingly, under their breath–they do so only as if to describe a hallucination that all women can see, rather than a concrete reality that no one acknowledges.”

Check out some of these images from Genderads.com:

This is so true. It’s an unspoken fact amongst women, that we must focus on our physical appearance. I have experienced this countless number of times. Just last week I was in the locker room, speaking to a married Pilates teacher whom I took a yoga class with, when I noticed her giving my body a once over as I was changing; it felt like she was comparing my body to her’s.

Wolf also makes a good point about in the comparison to the East. While women in the United States do not need to cover their face, they are often encouraged to wear dresses to events and I have heard numerous times from the women the pressure to wear make up to “look professional.”

Also, has anyone see Miss Universe or any of the other beauty pageants? It is INSANE to judge women on how they look in a swimsuit. Call me crazy, but I just can not understand how these beauty pagents are still going on. I can only imagine what young girls are thinking as they turn to their mother during the swimsuit contest asking: Mom, what are they judging these girls on to which the mother responds, “On the size of her butt, sweetheart, and how toned her legs are. These are important qualities for a woman to have. Maybe one day, you too, will have the ‘assets” these girls have.”

When do we discuss it? I think finally we are coming to terms with the consequences through movies like Miss Representation. What are your thoughts? Please feel free to share. The more we speak about the beauty myth, the less power we give it.

I will leave you with this ad:

Please share and comment.

First of all, Happy New Year. Hope everyone is having a great year.

I have been really busy researching objectification theory. For those who are unfamiliar with objectification theory (Fredrickson and Roberts, 1997) it is when women adapt a third person’s point of view on themselves. Self objectification dehumanizes women and makes them more susceptible to depression, anxiety and eating disorders.

According to Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher and a distinguished Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, objectification means:

treating a person as a tool for the objectifier’s purpose
denial of autonomy
treating a person as lacking in agency
treating a person as being interchangeable with other objects
treating a person as lacking in boundary
treating a person as something that is owned by another
treating a person as someone whose experiences should not be taken into account.

I came upon a really interesting study that confirmed that we are more prone to look at women in terms of her parts than we are when we look at men. There are consequences to showing women as objects.

To test subjects on how the participants view men and women women, researchers focused on two types of processing—local and global. Global processing is how the brain identifies people as a whole and local processing is when people focus on the specific parts of an object.

Each person was showed 48 nonsexualized pictures of either a man or a young woman and after they were two pictures—the original picture and a picture that had an alteration to the waist or the chest. The participant had to pick which picture he/she had just seen. In some cases, the second group of pictures zoomed in on the chest or waist only and asked the participants to pick the body part they had seen just seen verses the one that was changed.

The study clearly showed that participants used global processing when viewing pictures of men verses using local processing when viewing pictures of women.

However, it was possible to modify the results. In a second experiment, researchers primed the participants with either images of letters made up of a mosaic of tiny letters—an H made up of lots of little Ts and were told either to identity the tiny letters that encouraged local processing or were asked to identify the big letter, which activated global processing. The results found that the latter group were much less likely to objectify women. Mood was also shown to be related to global processing. So if you’re in a good mood, you’re less likely to objectify women. Just another reason to smile.

Men and women were both guilty of doing this. According to Sarah Gervais, one of the authors of the study, “It could be related to different motives. Men might be doing it because they’re interested in potential mates, while women may do it as more of a comparison with themselves. But we do know is that they’re both doing it.”

Check out some of these images that encourage objectification of women.

This advertisement not only shows a women who is scantly dressed but also shows a man’s foot kicking her.

This ad says what man care about is just a pair of enhanced breasts.

“Women’s bodies and their body parts are used to sell all sorts of products but we are now for everyday, ordinary women, processing them in a similar way,” Gervais said. That’s a good point. The pictures in the study were every day women. It would be very interesting to see how objectification impacts decision making on young girls as well as on boys. How does these results impact women in the workplace, school, and in friendships with the opposite sex?

Another question is what are people doing to change the way that women are seen and portrayed? Jennifer Newsom is encouraging women to take a pledge as well as recruiting leaders to further the cause of social equality. Here’s a list of resources as well.

Lastly, what about the impact that these ads have on young boys?

Look at this and ask yourself what message it is telling teenage boys.

Let’s get a discussion going. How do you objectify women? What’s one thing you can do to start looking at a woman as whole instead of just a sum of her body parts? I am going to consciously stop myself when I start judging a woman based on her looks before I speak with her. I would love to hear your thoughts. What do you think?